LAUNCH INTO SUMMER

LAUNCH INTO SUMMER

Patterns, water, summer holidays and a lifetime of painting are all on offer this summer season with four exciting new exhibitions on display at the Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum.

On display until February 3 is the Craft Queensland exhibition Pattern Recognition. Pattern has entranced artists for millennia and this exhibition brings together nine Australasian artists for whom pattern is a shared language. Pattern recognition is the means by which computers recognise the rise and fall of the stock market, and the intimate composition of our faces, speech and fingerprints.

Pattern Recognition, toured by Museum and Gallery Services Queensland, gives us a new way of recognising the conscious, and less overt, possibilities of pattern in object making.

On display until January 31 is the collaborative installation Triple Vision: Water Linking Our Lives. With the majority of Australians being coast dwellers this exhibition taps into our relationship with water from enjoyment to necessity, from the beach to industry.

The six installations have photographs and paintings by Kim Scrimshaw, sculptures and assemblage by Rosemary Anderson and poetry by John Anderson. Tapping into the Australian psyche, the three installations, Beach, Recreation and Carnival, look at water for leisure. In contrast the three installations, Harbour, Wharf, and Power, depict our dependence on water for sustainability and employment.

What did you do on your Summer holidays? In this new history exhibition local residents share their memories of Summers gone by. Bert Norris recalls taking half a day to travel to Tannum Sands to stay in their holiday shack made from flattened kerosene tins and Joe Schneider remembers joyriding around mudflats when he was too small to see over the steering wheel.

The fourth exhibition, Joan Wright: 40 Years of Painting, takes a retrospective look at Joan's work and her contribution to the arts in Gladstone.

As an artist, writer, poet, teacher and avid gardener, Joan is continually inspired by her surroundings be it the wider community or in her own garden. This collection of sketches, paintings, fibreworks, china and poetry showcase Joan's artistic talents.

Joan Wright: 40 Years of Painting will be on display until January 27.

Inset: Dorothy Filshie: Jugs.(Pattern Recognition)